I have just finsihed slaughtering a whole bunch of humons on the howling ghost badlands. It has been the first time I have played Wesnoth in ages.

Spoiler:

It involved having a bad day and going to work on my day off to tell my boss that I would resign and or murder someone because everything was <organic fertilzer> and so I played Wesnoth to feel good again, it actually worked.

It reminded me of the fun I used to have playing with my brothers, we would hotseat "comp-stomp" with a lot of competitive co-operation and dirty underhanded co-operative play. Anyway, it gave me an idea, what about a senario especially designed for that mode of play but online.

An example I could give would be that there is a dragon (unbelievibly hardcore lv 5+ unit not found in normal Wesnoth) which is the AI side, the map is designed to give the AI a massive advantage. Then there are three human players - just to spice things up a little I thought of an optional mode of play where there was a rock paper scisors thing going on, so one player could attack the units of another player but not the third who could attack him(?)- the player who defeats the dragon and takes the treasure is the winner. Thing is that the dragon is recruiting normal Wesnoth fire dragons and sea serpents and all kinds of crazy stuff, it has virtually unlimited gold and the map gives it an advantage, so the human players must co-operate to be in a position to compete, but of course they are sabotaging one another form the word go.

I posted my idea here because I just wanted to discuss it, not seriously propose it. I am no longer in the position where I have time to think about making stuff for Wesnoth and I am not telling people "make this for me", so I just wondered what people would think of the idea, that's all.

When I think of a Wesnoth MMO, I imagine exploring, winning, and grinding to unlock content, like factions, units, maps, and campaigns. It might be that when you first unlock a faction, you only get about three units in that faction, but can then unlock more. Or something silly like that.

I believe a huge 200x200 hex map that takes days to win where you earn victory points by advancements, kills, finding items, and defeating ai kings, And when you get more victory points you can recruit new soldiers and buy new things - that would be fun to play.

This sounds pretty fun, though I wouldn't exactly call it an MMO if there are only three players. The rock-paper-scissors thing could work well if the map was designed well; I don't think it would work if one player was in-between the other two (ie the dragon is at the top of the map and the three are trying to fight their way up toward it). Suppose the dragon was in the middle, and the three teams are working inwards from different corners of a triangle? That would make it hard to find the right map size; decently short distances between players, but decently long distance to the dragon in the middle... idk, the map-maker would have to be pretty creative. Maybe use tunnels?

Also, I think this game would only be fun if you were playing with people you knew. I imagine lots of people would get frustrated quickly if they thought a stranger was attacking them too much; I know and love what you mean by "dirty, underhanded co-operative play," but a lot of people would hate it.

Here is my vague idea about a game that's closer to being an MMO. Suppose you somehow got 20 players together in a game. They're in two teams, playing capture-the-flag (ie, each team has a base on opposite sides of the map, and the goal is to move a unit to the enemy's base and escape alive). To avoid ridiculously long waits between turns, each team has only one unit, and a very short turn limit. Just one unit? That doesn't sound like much fun, but let me explain: whenever one unit attacks another, the two involved players leave the game and have a small, separate match (with much more than 1 unit per team). While they're fighting, their units on the big, original map just hold still, missing turns. Maybe there could even be a way for other players to come and join the fight. By using PersistanceWML there might even be a way to keep your veterans/gold from one small fight to the next; i don't know much about it. If that can't work, the players would have to keep a record of their remaining gold.

The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.

Oh, i wouldn't say that. Making a map fit for capture-the-flag would be the only hard part. Using an event to prevent actual combat and droid the involved parties instead would be easy. It could also display instructions for the small fight (gold, maybe a specific map, etc). Then host would have to give them their sides back, and they'd use menu options to input information about the fight (remaining gold, winner) so the game could put the loser in a team jail or something. And programming victory for a unit that moves to the enemy base and returns to his own would be pretty easy.

Of course, i've done very little work in multiplayer, so keeping stuff in sync might be harder than i imagine.

Now i kind of want to try making it, but i'm pretty involved in a different project right now.

The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.

Now thinking about it more it could be done pretty easily with a large 200x200 map with a large area of blank space. On combat that blank area could be turned into a separate battlefield and other players could join it by also attacking either of the players fighting. This would be better than multiple games because it wouldn't have syncing issues and the players would not have to set anything up.

As for capture the flag that could be created through a simple use of moveto events and variables.

Samonella: you have some really good ideas.
The thing about it being massive was that the maps would have to be by Wesnoth standards for it to work properly, it wasn't my intention to make a Wesnoth MMO in the traditional sense (since I find these really boring anyway).
As for the way people squabble and intrigue amongst themselves while trying to achieve a common objective... no, many wouldn't like that, but those who do would love it. I think it comes down to how important predictability is in your enjoyment of things. If you value it highly then you'll not appreciate things done to make this sort of game interesting. AB blood types will go crazy over it .

The_Gnat: you too have some really good ideas and I must say that your interest in this undertaking is far greater than my own at this point . Anyway your enthusiasm makes me feel like this isn't just a pointless discussion of something someone could do some day, but a planning session for an upcoming project! That's called leadership my friend.
I actually want to actively become involved now.

It would be great if this scenario actually turned out well, i'd love playing it. Here are a few ideas i've had:

The biggest question is exactly what kind of challenges keep you from getting to the big, boss dragon. I that it would be good to handle his income independently from normal wesnoth rules, so suppose you gave him zero income, zero gold per village, and made all his units loyal. This way you have presice control over is regular income. Then, at the start of each of his turns, calculate the total worth of all the human sides' units (not hard to do) and give him some percent of that much gold (also not hard to do). This has a few big benefits:
1) multiple difficulties wouldn't be hard to make, by setting his income to an appropriate percent of the humans' total resources
2) by changing the percentage in-game, you can make the difficulty harder/easier according to how close to the dragon the players are
3) (this could be good or bad) the game is still win-able if one or two sides get completely defeated
4) most importantly, the difficulty is dynamic, so if the players spend a few turns fighting each other they aren't all completely doomed when the next wave of enemies appears.

Of course, you could have other challenges besides just the units the dragon recruits; guardian units that block choke-points and can't move would be particularly useful because the players would be forced to kill them before advancing. This gives the programmer an easy way to detect how close to the dragon the players are. You could do fun things like change the dragon's recruit list to match the terrain of the next set of challenges.

The one problem i see on the horizon would be that there's a delay between the dragon's units and your own; what i mean is that if you fight a bunch and suddenly have very few units, there are still a few turns' worth of enemies coming your way that were recruited based on you having a much larger force. You could minimize it by teleporting the dragon's new recruits out to just behind the outer-most choke-point that the players haven't conquered.

On a completely different note, there is one problem with the sides. So suppose you and the person you are allowed to attack are getting along, working together for the moment. Your ally/enemies units still have ZoC, so manuvering together and coordinating attacks would be really hard. Maybe you have a right-click menu option to change your alliance with that person?

The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.

On a completely different note, there is one problem with the sides. So suppose you and the person you are allowed to attack are getting along, working together for the moment. Your ally/enemies units still have ZoC, so manuvering together and coordinating attacks would be really hard. Maybe you have a right-click menu option to change your alliance with that person?

Changing sides itself is not too hard, but since you don't want some one just allying with another team when they don't want, you could create a array with one value for side 1 and another value for side 2, if both values equal true at the start of a turn then the sides are modified to be on the same team. Then at any time on their turn a player can right click and request that another player be on his side. Obviously if that player refuses than the sides stay the same. (obviously for 9 sides you would need a lot of variables but that should be fine)

The only question i am wondering is where does this idea you presented earlier fit:

Here is my vague idea about a game that's closer to being an MMO. Suppose you somehow got 20 players together in a game. They're in two teams, playing capture-the-flag (ie, each team has a base on opposite sides of the map, and the goal is to move a unit to the enemy's base and escape alive). To avoid ridiculously long waits between turns, each team has only one unit, and a very short turn limit. Just one unit? That doesn't sound like much fun, but let me explain: whenever one unit attacks another, the two involved players leave the game and have a small, separate match (with much more than 1 unit per team). While they're fighting, their units on the big, original map just hold still, missing turns. Maybe there could even be a way for other players to come and join the fight. By using PersistanceWML there might even be a way to keep your veterans/gold from one small fight to the next; i don't know much about it. If that can't work, the players would have to keep a record of their remaining gold.

(is this just another idea you came up with? Which idea are we going to be actively discussing the CTF or the dragon scenario)

The_Gnat wrote:Changing sides itself is not too hard, but since you don't want some one just allying with another team when they don't want, you could create a array with one value for side 1 and another value for side 2, if both values equal true at the start of a turn then the sides are modified to be on the same team. Then at any time on their turn a player can right click and request that another player be on his side. Obviously if that player refuses than the sides stay the same. (obviously for 9 sides you would need a lot of variables but that should be fine)

Let's just stick with three sides, huh?
How about instead of "requesting" alliances, you just ask them via chat, and they have the options to make the change immediately, without waiting for a turn-end. All sides will always have have two options in the right-click menu. To explain them, suppose the three teams are x, y, and z, and the rock-paper-scissors is setup so that x can attack y, y can attack z, and z can attack x. So here are the options that side x has:
1) declare peace with z (so z can move through your ZoC)
2) declare war with y (so you can attack them, even if they previously made peace with you)
The other teams would have similar options: they can always choose to attack a certain team, but once they declare war only the defending team can declare peace again.
Also, the "teams" in a more traditional sense of the word would be reset each side turn, so that even if x has declared war with and can attack y, y cannot directly fight back. Y can use ZoC to try to hold off x, but the only way to retaliate properly is to make a deal with z.
Thoughts?

The_Gnat wrote:The only question i am wondering is where does this idea you presented earlier fit:

(is this just another idea you came up with? Which idea are we going to be actively discussing the CTF or the dragon scenario)

My more recent post was completely about the dragon scenario. I thought about capture-the-flag some more, but it is seeming less and less feasible. Mostly because it would require more players than it is ever possible to round up on the server, bare minimum five per team. I can't even get 6 for colosseum, which is already really popular.

On the other hand, the dragon scenario is seeming more and more realistic: here are my thoughts on the world map. Scrapping the triangular world idea, suppose the three teams were fighting towards the top of the map afterall. To avoid undue pressure on the middle team, suppose we used [tunnel]s along the east-west map borders so the world basically wraps around. This way there is an equal distance between each pair of teams while avoiding the complication of a huge, circular-ish map. If you implement the [tunnel]s in a certain way, the ai will even be able smart enough to take advantage of the teleporting option.
More thoughts?

Wow, this is sounding better and better. Maybe we should set up a git repository to make it in.lol thoughts?

The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.

Sooo... did this idea just quietly have a stroke or something? I'd like to give it a shot, but there' s no point in trying to do it alone; it takes three people to test anything more than basic mechanics.

The last few months have been nothing but one big, painful reminder that TIMTLTW.